The application for Germany’s Science4Life Venture Cup 2016 is now open! Join the competition to meet sector-specific experts, benefit from the experiences of former participants and win up to €25k to help your startup to get to the next level.
Labiotech knows from its own experience that an aspiring startup needs a convincing business plan to succeed. But there is so much to think about and so many other tasks to get done in the meantime, it is sometimes hard to focus. So get yourself some professional support!
Science4Life is a non-profit organization that wants to help founders and young entrepreneurs in the field of life sciences and chemistry through the tricky starting phase. Its annual business plan competition attracts newcomers to consult with experts that have already experienced the same difficulties. As a participant, you can join workshops and seminars, meet coaches from industry and science and exchange experiences with other participants.
Jochen Maas © SanofiAlso, it’s the right time to create a business, says Jochen Maas, R&D manager from Sanofi-Aventis Germany, which is a major sponsor of the cup. Germany’s investors have never before been so generous to young companies. However, the country can still learn another thing or two from the US, where the financial conditions for high-tech companies remain significantly better.
To give you a little taste of your potential opponents, here are the first three winners of the last edition of the contest, to which 129 entrepreneurs from across the world submitted their ideas. Besides making a serious name for themselves, they were also rewarded with one-on-one workshops and prize money ranging from €5k to €25k.
In first place was TolerogenixX from Heidelberg. This startup develops a technology that makes transplantations safer by modifying the immune system.
Second place went to Darmstadt-based Sulfotools, a chemistry startup which aims to reduce costs and prevent pollution from the industrial process of peptide synthesis by replacing toxic organic solvents with water.
Aquila biolabs was third place, developing a novel piece of laboratory equipment: the Cell Growth Quantifier. It can measure the cell density in Erlenmeyer flasks in real-time.
The Cell Growth Quantifier to monitor the cell density in Erlenmeyer flasks © aquila biolabsAll these projects sound great, so let’s hope the Science4Life Venture Cup will help them to successfully launch their technologies for commercial use in the future.
If you also have an idea in mind and need a push to carry it through the starting phase, submit it until 23 October to make the best of it! For more information, click here.